Good grief, it's Daddy

Maralyn Lois Polak is a Philadelphia-based journalist, screenwriter, essayist, novelist, editor, spoken-word artist, performance poet and occasional radio personality. With architect Benjamin Nia, she has just completed a short documentary film about the threatened demolition of a historic neighborhood, "MY HOMETOWN: Preservation or Development?" on DVD. She is the author of several books including the collection of literary profiles, "The Writer as Celebrity: Intimate Interviews," and her latest volume of poetry, "The Bologna Sandwich and Other Poems of LOVE and Indigestion." Her books can be ordered by contacting her directly.

This is the first installment of a new exclusive weekly column by Maralyn Lois Polak. Her column will run in WorldNetDaily every Wednesday.

My heart goes out to Chelsea Clinton, poor kiddo. Apparently her relationship with her first serious boyfriend has become a casualty of her father’s sexcapades — she’s so stressed out she may have even gone to the college medical service complaining of shortness of breath.

Fathers are like that. One day you’re the apple of their eye, dandled on
their knee, Daddy’s little girl, the next they are grossing you out so majorly
you find yourself thinking of writing to Dr. Laura under a pseudonym, until
news leaks out that Dr. Laura has her own sex scandal to live down, and suddenly you have a killer migraine that won’t quit even though you haven’t had any red wine or bleu cheese to trigger it off.

Matters could be worse, Chelsea, if there’s any comfort in that. Didja see
where Canaan Banana, the former president of Zimbabwe and a minister to boot, was a fugitive from justice after being nailed on sodomy charges? This guy got recently convicted on 11 transgressions “… using his power as president,” the Associated Press reported, “to force bodyguards, a cook, and a gardener” to service him sexually. Talk about your presidential timber.

The case could be made, Chelsea, that since Banana’s presidential post was
largely ceremonial, he had too much time on his hands, and those idle, er,
hands of his found the Devil’s work. Banana, of course, contends the charges were trumped up by his political enemies to stymie a possible come-back by impugning his character and ruining his reputation. I can hear the jokes there now: “Is that Canaan Banana in your pocket or are you glad to see me?” There could be a parallel here, gurl, with your paterfamilias, but I don’t know how far you want to go to ferret it out.

Meanwhile, Banana’s presidential successor Robert Mugabwe lambastes homosexuality as a corrupt practice introduced to his country by decadent
Western nations. Same-sex partners, says the current Zimbabwe president,

are “lower than pigs and dogs.” This is so different from America, Chelsea,
where your family’s pet dog and cat are the heroes of their own best-selling
book, and where Babe the Pig’s again a matinee idol, wouldn’t you agree?

It’s kind of a rite of passage, your Papa falling off a pedestal. Happens
in real life all the time, Plus, it’s a familiar theme in literature. When
Geoffrey Wolfe discovered HIS father was a charming fraud he constructed an irresistible narrative, “The Duke of Deception,” detailing this unmasking.
Duke Wolfe — don’t you just love the macho clout of that moniker — brazened his way into becoming an aerospace exec without benefit of ever studying
engineering. Both the Wolfe brothers, Geoffrey and Tobias, went on to become writers, so there is that measly consolation. “Bad experience,” Carrie Fisher likes to say, “good poem.”

Take my own father. I worshipped him all my life. Even though I saw him
light into my little brother and whale him again and again with a strap, for no
real reason, Daddy was a towering figure to me, a stocky Khrushchev lookalike and high-school dropout who became an electronics engineer by sheer willpower. And then, a week after Father’s Day several years ago, he took his life without leaving a note. Good grief, it’s Daddy!! Yeah, it hurt, Chelsea. Bad. For a long time.

These things don’t go away, Chelsea, by themselves, so I suggest you find
yourself a good counselor, one that you trust. And not like your Mom channeling the shade of Eleanor Roosevelt for consolation in difficult moments, either. Discarnate entities, even if they are the stuff Hollywood movies thrive on, just won’t do. Inevitably you feel betrayed, and insecure. Clingy, even. What needs to be done is some tinkering with your deep personal architecture, shore up those sagging foundations of disbelief. Stay away from the woo-woo stuff, at least for now.

After my father died, I went home to New Jersey to clean out the house. And
I opened up my father’s closet, and out came a WHOOSH! The vortex almost

sucked me in, but I resisted. Hot, red, angry it was, and loud, like he could be. I was searching for some kind of clue to his suicide. Some rune or rubric,
some Rosetta Stone, some Something to explain his bleak defection from this
life. Lord, Please, I shouted into the abyss, Give me a sign!!

That’s what I said I wanted, but what I needed was much more: An explanation, an end to self-torture. How this man was so precise — so compulsive he marked his adding machine batteries with their date of insertion in thick black ink — could still do himself in and leave no note. Tell me that, O Lord.

But what was this? On the shelf of the closet, on the floor, his palpable
presence. Tubes and wires. Capacitors and conductors. Volts and ohms. Transistors and resistors. His guts. All his electronic paraphernalia. All
his machines. All his magic. All the arcane and archaic equipment with which my father practiced his engineer’s lonely craft. Unplugged. Forever separated
from their purpose. No current. No juice. No science. No more. Heavy old

boxes. Obsolete. No good, not even for salvage. Forever mute.

What could I do? Nothing. I had to toss them out into the trash. Haul them
out alone. Get bruised, grimy, splintered. Then I knew he was dead. Only then could I rest.